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Prestigious American award for Danish Professor Maiken Nedergaard

Prize

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has awarded scientist Maiken Nedergaard their oldest prize for a study that shows how the brain cleans itself during sleep.

Research highlighting the understanding of the brain and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s has been awarded the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The Association’s oldest prize, the Newcomb Cleveland Prize annually recognizes the author or authors of an outstanding paper published in the journal, Science. The award will be presented this Friday, 13th February, at the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Jose, California. This year’s prize was awarded for a paper that appeared in the October 2013 edition of Science, entitled “Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain.” Among the authors is Maiken Nedergaard, who is also a Professor at Center of Basic and Translational Neuroscience at The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen.

Solves a mystery

The study builds on the earlier discovery by a team of researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) that the brain possesses its own unique waste removal system, dubbed the glymphatic system. The 2013 Science study revealed that the glymphatic system is highly active during sleep, clearing away toxins responsible for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders. Furthermore, the researchers found that during sleep the brain’s cells reduce in size, allowing waste to be removed more effectively.

This discovery may also explain the biological purpose of sleep by showing that the brain must devote its limited energy to being alert and processing information wile awake or to clearing waste while asleep. The URMC team has since gone on to show that the glymphatic system slows in function as we age and it can become impaired after a traumatic brain injury. “Prior to the discovery of the glymphatic system, no one really understood how the brain dealt with waste,” says Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.SC., co-director of the URMC Center for Translational Neuromedicine and lead author of the article.

“This research not only solves this mystery, but it provides us with an opportunity to re-examine and potentially treat neurodegenerative diseases; almost all of which are associated with the accumulation of cellular waste products.”

“The awarding of the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize marks one of the highlights of the year for Science and the continuation of a tradition that is more than 90 years old,” said Marcia McNutt, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals. “I am particularly thrilled with this year’s selection that explains why organisms require sleep: to flush waste products from the brain. The results are both startling and profound, and will likely impact neuroscience research for years to come."

AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the Science family of journals. The organization was founded in 1848, and includes more than 250 affiliated societies and academies of science serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million.